Personal Independence Payment

Lord McAvoy Excerpts

Tuesday 24th June 2014 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord McAvoy]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what measures they are taking to tackle delays in personal independence payment assessments.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud) (Con)]

We are committed to ensuring that personal independence payment claimants receive high-quality, objective, fair and accurate assessments. I acknowledge that the end-to-end claimant journey is taking longer than expected. We are absolutely committed to improving performance, both ours and that of the assessment providers.

[Lord McAvoy (Lab)]

My Lords, as the Minister is aware, his own department’s figures show that it will take 42 years to clear the backlog. Yesterday in the House of Commons the Minister of State, Mike Penning, said that this was scaremongering. If that is the case, can the Minister give a guarantee as to when it will be cleared?

[Lord Freud]

One can do some funny things with mathematics and that 42-year figure is one of them. Clearly in the opening period of any new policy of this sort there is a ramp-up, and we need to get that ramp-up right. As I said, the position of this process is not satisfactory and we are taking a lot of steps to make sure that we get the improvement that we must have. We are pushing up the numbers of staff, improving claimant communications in this process, getting more paper-based reviews which will speed the process up, and taking a series of other initiatives to get this right.